An Afternoon With Miho + Michael Lomon

Miho and Mike Lomon are a creative couple living in West London. Miho is an animator, pixilation artist and Japanese nursery teacher and Mike is a motion graphics designer, illustrator and comic book artist. They met at Nottingham Trent University’s fine art BA course, and being the only two interested in animation, they noticed each other while getting competitive over the booking of the limited equipment there. They had a traditional wedding in Japan and are currently living in a charming flat surrounded by the various gifts they have made for each other over the years.

Miho has recently worked on numerous pixilation projects to cheer on and raise money for those affected by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami last year via her animation studio ANIMATSUDA, and Mike has just released the second of his self published comic book series Metal Between Two Faces.

ここ最近、美穂さんは東日本大震災の被災地復興支援のため、ピクレーションビデオを自身のアニメーションスタジオ「ANIMATSUDA」で制作中だ。マイクさんは自費出版しているマンガシリーズ「Metal Between Two Faces」の２作目をリリースしたばかり。

I chatted to them about their work, life in London and the visual horror witnessed on the commuter trains in Japan.

彼らの作品、影響、ロンドンでの生活や日本の通勤電車に見られるビジュアルホラーについて話を聞いた。

Miho is from Kanagawa in Japan and she started taking art seriously in her mid-teens, when she went to a specialist art school to study basic skills for the tough entrance exams of the art universities in Japan. Her tutor encouraged his students to go overseas to his colleague at Nottingham Trent University, who was the fine art course co-ordinator.

Miho applied and was successful in getting a place on the course. Not knowing any English, she arrived 6 months before the course started to attend English classes. After graduating, Miho did a year of admin work in an office, which she found terrible and not for her at all. After moving to London, she became a Japanese nursery teacher.

Miho: “I wanted to start doing animation workshops for 8 to 12 year olds, but you can’t do that unless you have at least 2 years’ experience of working with children. I like working in the nursery as we do a lot of creative things. It’s quite impressive that being creative can actually educate children, basic stuff like learning how to use scissors, or cutting circles. It’s quite funny that even if you give the children a very big sheet of paper, they always end up cutting really small circles, I don’t know why!”

Mike is from Manchester and he started drawing at a very young age, when his mother would copy drawings of characters from cartoons and video games for him and his brother to colour in. He went to art college and did a foundation course where he started animating with paper and puppets and at Nottingham Trent he focused on stop-motion.

Mike: “After graduating from uni, I spent 3 years making a short animation about a job I was doing, working full time in a pub kitchen. It was when Miho was working in the office. I had agreed to finish it by a certain time to be screened at some Nottingham cinema. I didn’t finish it on time, and it was too weird and violent to show anyway! I would come back from my pub kitchen job and work on the animation about that same job in the evening. Miho even started helping me doing the in-between frames because I was just spending so much time in a room alone, so it wasn’t much fun for her!

When it was finally finished, I was just like, “…what is this?” It kind of put me off animation – I just thought, “why would I wanna do that again?” So I started doing comics and one off illustrations, which seemed like a better use of my time. I draw with ink and watercolour and do a little touching up in Photoshop. So for the last 2 years I’ve just been doing comic stuff alongside motion graphics, which is my full-time occupation.”

Mike: “It seems like a sensible idea, and I think it would be a lot of fun, but we work in very different ways. Miho’s very immediate, even in the way she draws, she will draw it straight away, and not rub stuff out too much. It’s got her style about it. I, on the other hand, would sketch it out first, then go deeper into the drawing, then lose faith in it, walk around a bit and come back to it. There would always have to be some sort of struggle! So I think we would clash.”

Mike: “I’ve been over there three times. Once when I was a student, once to get married and one other time for a holiday. I found that in Akihabara, a.k.a. otaku-world, things are very intense. They cater for all sorts of bizarre interests. Obviously there was manga everywhere, and we spotted some people wearing masks looking at the erotic section… I was quite embarrassed and uncomfortable to see those people but they’re happy to just stand there and look at the stuff, so there is clearly more openness and acceptance of people’s personal perverse interests; which is cool in a way!

But that contrasts with something that my good friend who came with me said when I initially went. He was frustrated in the way the Japanese weren’t very forthcoming, or they weren’t really saying what they were thinking. He thought they weren’t giving a quick, honest opinion or feedback about anything. Personally I didn’t really feel the frustration, but agreed with what he thought. I felt like there was more thought in setting up an environment that’s nice for everyone, whereas in England we wouldn’t do that. Here you’re more likely to just say what you wanna say, it’s a more forceful social interaction.”

Miho: “I think maybe in England. If I think of the working hours in Japan, I don’t wanna be there! I think that’s the main reason I want to live here, I can be more lazy! Everyone wants to be lazy to an extent! I also don’t miss the train commute in the main cities of Japan. I used to travel from Yokohama to Tokyo on the train everyday during high school, and it was a traumatic experience.

In the summer it’s really hot, and you’d always end up with some very fat man in front of you, and you would watch the sweat droplets form on his head and drip down the folding rolls of fat on his neck – so horrible! Or someone’s face would be pressed onto the window and the sweat would run down the glass. The visual horror! It really has left a big impression on me. Often my bag would still be outside the train and the doors will close, or as people squeeze out to exit the carriage, my bag would be dragged out with them!

Mike: “I’m working on a comic about this ballad singer, a cross between Julio Inglesias and Tom Jones, who is getting on a bit and kind of overweight and grotesque. It’s about him recapturing his muse – he’s fed up with writing generic love songs and he gets a little wake up call and thinks he’s found his mojo again, but he ends up writing the same old shit. A humorous tragedy.